The Culture of Harassment
Little by little, with tragic backlashes and delays, societies become conscious of themselves, of the limitations and blind spots in their cultures. Norbert Elias has, in his book ... Civilization described some such developments in what is commonly known as Western culture. It is a fun to read that at late as ... century people had to be taught not ...
According to any standard of ethics based on empathy, the Golden Rule in any of its versions, there has been some real progress in human behaviour. Despite all the horrors of German and Soviet extermination and labour camps, despite all the horrors of colonial and post-colonial warfare, there are some standards of behaviour accepted - at least formally - by all nations. There are things that cannot be approved by any existing morals, e.g. cannibalism, slavery, genocide, glorification of making war and killing people. Of course, such things happen, but their perpetrators have to act covertly or to step out of the world community and its code of behaviour to justify what the community considers to be inhuman and improper. If I am right, this is something we could call progress. It is desperately slow, but it seems to exist. It is a progress in our critical understanding. Some customs and attitudes considered perfectly normal lose their legitimacy and are abandoned as immoral after a period of struggle between conservatives and reformers. Such things are, for example, slavery, forced marriages, use of torture during inquiry, corporal punishment, death penalty, religious, racial and gender intolerance, etc. It is worthwhile to recall how all the people who stood for abolishing such customs were ridiculized and even attacked as unpatriotic, impious and hopelessly unrealistic. Hunting for and trading human beings, torturing suspected witches and heretics and burning them at stake, stoning adulterous women, hanging thieves were once upon time considered inevitable in many communities. Anybody casting doubt upon them became suspicious herself-himself.
Nowadays most educated people anywhere in the world agree that such things as slavery and torture are barbaric customs and should be abolished completely. Let us now turn from the past to the present and future, let us extrapolate from the above mentioned examples. It would be naïve to presume that our present age is fully enlightened and at least in more educated and well-to-do societies all barbaric, inhuman and odious customs are abolished. It would be wiser to think that there are plenty of abominable things going on in even the most civilized societies. We simply are conditioned not to notice them, to take them for granted, to believe that they are unavoidable, absolutely necessary for preserving our cherished and civilized way of life.
It is reasonable to ask what are such customs now accepted as normal, but possibly looked upon with disgust and horror in not too distant future. As our future predilections are largely unpredictable, I can here only makes guesses supported by what I think, are visible trends in our culture. I am nearly convinced that future generations would consider our way of handling animals, be it in production units, slaughterhouses or on the way there utterly barbaric. Possibly they will have very few kind words to say about our hunting behaviour, and, of course on our attitude to the living beings in the sea whom we consider just a source of protein, fat and money paying no attention to the suffering of innumerable fish, seals, whales and small marine animals. The animal liberation movement is, in my opinion, one instance of our awakening consciousness, our understanding of the great web of life, chain of being or Medicine Wheel, whatever name we prefer. It is possibly a sign of irreversible change.
Besides possible changes in our attitudes toward other living beings there are others concerning our social behaviour. Our societies, especially the so-called Western ones are totalitarian in the sense that there is no legal way of escaping them: a human being or a group cannot leave the society, to build up its own one, with different laws and rules. I think that the possibility of going away, leaving the society, is an alternative many people need at a period of their life. Such possiblity existed in many cultures. In ancient Near East, people went away to the desert as John the Baptist. In China, people dissatisfied with life in the society went away to the mountains. In Russia the so-called old-believers retired to faraway places in Siberia and elsewhere to be able to live according to their beliefs. In Catholic and Orthodox countries, people have at least one way of leaving the big society - going to monastery. In the Protestant and post-Protestant North even this possibility doesn’t exist. And the Protestants and Post-Protestants are making a big effort to change the world into a global village. It would inevitably mean increased control over dissident groups and individuals and less privacy for them. It would also mean more bureaucratic, sexual, commercial and religious harassment.
What I mean by bureaucratic harassment needs no extended comment. It is clear to anybody with some experience of what means life inside a modern state, be it the USSR, USA or EU. Anywhere regulations, definitions, questionnaires and forms tend to become your second nature replacing the first one. Increasingly you are, what the authorities and organizations consider you to be, you have to conform to your definition by them.
The concept of sexual harassment has been introduced in the recent past, and has proven useful in helping women to overcome the tendency to see them in any circumstances and primarily as potential sexual partners. This has been the kind of harassment that has found much publicity, leading to some improvement in womens’ situation, to decline of sexual harassment at workplaces.
So far what I call religious harassment has attracted much less attention. However, many of us have unpleasant experiences connected with it: missionaries knocking at your door, activists trying to convert or to save you, give you books and leaflets, invite you to their meetings. Nowadays many of these people are well versed in P.R., and they are quite efficient in neutralizing your resistance with their polite and amiable behaviour. They know how to make you feel guilty when you reject their love and attention. The essence of religious harassment is to regard other people primarily or even exclusively as potential members of a religious group and to try to make them join it.
What I call commercial harassment is very similar to the modern religious one. Here too, people are not threatened or terrorized openly, but lured and manipulated to do what the manipulators want them to do. Advertizing is one of the key concepts of our time, an aspect of power that has increased in importance during this century. This increase of advertizing and what I call religious harassment coincides with successful attempts of limiting the brutality of political power. Hasn’t one type of power replaced the other one?
We may well ask whether the results of this humanization of power have been unequivocally positive, have increased personal freedom. In a sense, “classical” power with its brutal methods of law enforcement was something definitely outside us, it usually left our personality intact. The new power often succeeds in infiltrating inside us, subjugating us from inside, thus leading to a kind of split personality, a personality that is subject to continuous harassment both from outside and inside.
The typical reaction of people to old-style tyrannical power was revolt. Isn’t the typical reaction to modern power, power of manipulation and advertizing use of drugs, alcoholism and drug addiction? Both phenomena are of recent origin and have gained their present threatening dimensions at modern times, times of freedom and humanism, but also of an increase in manipulation and harassment. Isn’t use of drugs also an attempt to regain an integrated personality, a freedom from alien power implanted inside us, from our schizoid condition?
If my hypothesis is correct, aren’t then all the attempts to combat drugs doomed unless something essential is changed in our culture, in our societies? What we should do is to leave people in peace, not to harass them incessantly and everywhere with commercial ads, religious and political propaganda, but also culture. The snowballing number of books, movies, videos, multimedia and cultural events can well be a source of harassment and mental stress. More free choice can in some instances mean less freedom. Or more bluntly: more freedom can sometimes mean less freedom. It would be strange if freedom were different from all other things, if only absence or scarcity of freedom were detrimental to us humans, not its excess. What, then, is the optimum amount of freedom? This is the question. If our heirs find an answer to it, they will possibly call our culture a culture of harassment and wonder how we could tolerate it for so long.
Published in Finland in a book of essays on mental sanity "Mielenterveys"